All About Medium

I Want to Stay On Your Story for Thirty Seconds, but I Also Want to Click Your Link

Tips for when you see something sparkly

This might be totally obvious to some of you, but something occurred to me recently that I thought I’d share.

So often the stories I read have links in them. I typically wait until I reach the end of whatever I’m reading before I click anything. I certainly wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s stats by clicking away prematurely.

There are times, however, when there are story-supporting links at the very beginning of the piece. Such is the case with my Adorable Explorers series, or Robert Gowty’s series about the box. If the reader hasn’t read the earlier installments, the current story might be confusing, or not as enjoyable. The reader might be very tempted to immediately click the link, thus penalizing the author for the newer story.

This is where my very simple solution comes in. I have started right-clicking the links, opening the linked material in a new tab or a new window, and reading to my heart’s content. This way, both stories get full reading points.

If this is totally obvious, and you guys have been doing this all along, I don’t mind if you laugh at me and berate me in the comments. But, I have seen many posts complaining about people clicking links and clicking away from articles too soon, and I have never seen this mentioned. I would think that as long as the other story remains open, and the reader eventually returns to finish it, the author would not be penalized.

This piece is awfully short, so to protect my stats, I will dazzle you with some beautiful hamster ballerinas. Perhaps this offering of eye candy will keep you here a touch longer.